> Joel C. Salomon wrote:
>
> > In some older Hebrew books, and in Hebrew calligraphy, a
> > technique used to align text to the outer margin is stretching
> > letters. Certain letters are particularly stretchable; in fact,
> > Unicode has several "wide letters" encoded in the Alphabetic
> > Presentation Forms area.
> >
> > For reference, compare:
> >
> > א = ﬡ, ד = ﬢ, ה = ﬣ, כ = ﬤ, ל = ﬥ, ם = ﬦ, ר = ﬧ, ת = ﬨ.
> >
> > At any rate, is there any way to make (any version of) TeX use
> > these to help justify lines?
>
> I personally know of no way of instructing TeX to consider these
> when optimising the layout of a paragraph, but Hàn Thế Thành's
> microtypographic extensions to PdfTeX offer an alternative. It
> seems to me that, in an ideal world, what one would actually want
> is a combination of the two such that given (for example) "ת" and
> "ﬨ" as the lower- and upper- bound respectively, a variant of
> Thành's work might usefully interpolate between the two. What this
> might add to the complexity of TeX's already complex paragraphing
> algorithm [2], I do not like to think !

It's a matter of fact that Thành's microtypographic extensions are a
vast improvement.

However, there is no way to interpolate between two glyphs of the same
character. Another problem is that pdfTeX doesn't support Unicode.
Hence, even if a font provides "wide letters", an enormous amount of
work is required to make them accessible.

I absolutely agree with Arno. I'm convinced that if there is a
reasonable solution at all, it's definitely LuaTeX.

Regards,
Reinhard

</pre>
</blockquote>
I ought not to get into this, because I don't know Hebrew, and have
set at most a line of it by glyph identities alone, but the
opportunity once again to support Phil is too good to miss,.<br>
<br>
Let's start with the statement that pdfTeX doesn't support Unicode.
I have written a short, simple and extendable plain TeX routine
that allows me to set pages of mixed English and Korean (both modern
and Classical forms) from the set of 256-character Unicode fonts
that the Korean TeX Users Group has made available. At the price of
keeping a large library of fonts rather than a composite Open-Type
font, it will accommodate even glyphs in the U+1FFFF world,
although I have never needed to. I hope that pdfTeX has not
deactivated the ordinary macros of plain TeX altogether.<br>
<br>
In the antediluvian years before TeX, I set a text in mediaeval
Arabic (Diocles, <i>On Burning Mirrors</i>) which made full use of
the far more elaborate system of alternative characters in Arabic.
The font was a VideoComp stroked font designed by myself and my
colleague Walter Andrews, and it was managed through two programs,
KATIB and HATTAT, which were written in Fortran, with C subroutines,
and even some embedded SDS assembler code---this was in 1974--75,
and the programs are obviously not retrievable. They amounted to a
sort of kindergarten version of TeX..<br>
<br>
The first step was to break up each paragraph into lines, after it
had been set ragged-left, and then apply the aesthetic criiteria of
a calligrapher (hence the name HATTAT) to each line. This could not
be a blind mechanical substitution of long-form characters, but
required several passes through a hierarchy of tests. For example,
the long form of Kaf (I regret that the Thunderbird editor makes it
too difficult to illustrate this elegant character) or of final Sad
and Dad almost always enhance line of Arabic, but they must not be
clustered, and I think I remember that I allowed only two long-form
Kafs in any one line. Two long form Kafs stacked one above the
other on adjacent lines was quite unacceptable and that had to be
dealt with by hand coding, like proof-correction. You have to have
a way of selective turning off the substition in the input code,<br>
<br>
One of the other messages in this chain suggests that the
substitution should be shut off for the last line of a paragraph.
Certainly not so in Arabic, and probably not so in Hebrew. There is
little that enhances a paragraph so much as a swooping final Sad or
Dad, or Kaf at the end of<br>
the last line. Even the simple "tooth-letters," Ba, Ta, Tha, Nun
and Ya, have elegant long forms that are very effective here.<br>
<br>
The least satisfactory aesthetic adjustment is the extension of the
join line, which is favored by flat-bottomed fonts in Arabic, but
that is obviously not a problem in Hebrew.<br>
<br>
Breaking up a paragraph into lines after a first pass through the
paragrapher is already dealt with in EDMAC, which delivers the
result as a sequence of one-line paragraphs. I found EDMAC overly
quirky the last time I used it, but it could probably be smoothed
out. With the speed of present CPU processors even on laptops, and
with really generous RAM for them to play in, I suspect that the
time consumed in making Unicode substitutions in each line would be
quite acceptable and, like Phil, I see no reason to think that it
would be impossible in basic TeX macros. I wouldn't like to take on
the job myself, but at 78 years old, I tend not to take on such
things,<br>
<br>
The price of beauty is a little pain.<br>
<br>
Pierre MacKay<br>
</body>
</html>